Sent My Dell Inspiron 1505 Back to Dell For Repairs

May 14, 2008
Filed Under Customer Experience |

After way too many emails, I sent my unreliable Dell Inspiron laptop back to Dell this week.

It has had the following problems: slow boot times, frequent blue screens, unreliablity connecting to the Internet due to a flaky Internet card, weak and broken hinges due to a poor design in fact, the Inspiron line got rid of this altogether with the latest redesign, gee maybe it’s because it was a design flaw?

This matter is made worse by the behavior of a certain inconsiderate Director of Dell’s community program, who rudely interrupted my conversation with a senior person from a major search engine last fall because he thought inspecting my hinges was important at that moment.

Dell was founded on reliable, highly tested equipment that was flawless, this experience and the experiences of others show that is no longer the case, they play word games and do not stand by their products and take responsibility for their design flaws - in fact my mahcine wasn’t even made in the US, which used to be one of Dell’s mantras.

This laptop is an unreliable and poorly designed machine. It is why people like Danny Sullivan and others are switching brands. I agree with my good friend Danny totally when he says:

“My plea is simple. Empower your customer service people to simply replace things that don’t work rather than making them jump through whatever procedures you have in place that clearly don’t work.”

Update: It appears Dell VP Bob Pearson is more interested in selling new PC’s than creating satisfied customers who would then create positive word of mouth. PR does not equal customer focused culture and process improvement!!!

First time visitor? Please subscribe to my blog feed

Hello Dell “Community” Lurkers

Dell Hires New CFO Brian T. Gladden

Comments

10 Responses to “Sent My Dell Inspiron 1505 Back to Dell For Repairs”

Hello Dell “Community” Lurkers on May 16th, 2008 4:47 am

[...] of making lame excuses they could be amazing, intead they have blog posts, like the one mentioned in the post below where they moderate comments about the truth. [...]
Brad at Dell on May 16th, 2008 4:10 pm

David,
I’d like to comment on this and give your readers the other side of the story for the sake of clarity. You first contacted Dell’s Community Team about your Inspiron notebook in June of 2007, asking about your wireless connectivity. We sent you a link to the most recent driver for your card and you let us know the problem had been resolved. In September of 2007- four months after the service contract that you purchased had expired, you contacted us again indicating that you were “unsatisfied” with your notebook and after discussions where you said it had always been having problems, you let us know that the only acceptable solution would be to replace it- and replace it with a different, more expensive model. Prior to that, you made no mention of issues with this system- despite having interactions with the community team at Dell. You even blogged about it here:

http://www.daviddalka.com/createvalue/2007/01/17/dell-starting-to-truly-listen/

After you met with our Director, Sean McDonald, at the Forrester conference in Chicago -October 2007, we offered to extend your service contract at no cost to you in an attempt to have the machine looked at and fixed. You did not take us up on that offer, but rather, you again implied that you would have no problem installing your software on a *new* computer and intimated that you had not received any compassion or consideration for the “internet driver fiasco” that you had experienced. I can only assume this is the wireless driver that we helped you reinstall in June of 2007. Our consideration was to extend your service contract by an additional year and fix any issues you had at that time. You did not take us up on this offer. I find it odd that if this “flaky” wireless card was really a fiasco that you failed to mention over several months after getting the driver updates, in any of your previous blog posts about Dell.

In May of this year, we offered to have you send your Inspiron to our offices so that we could examine and fix the hinge you claimed was failing due to a design flaw as well as the wireless card and the error messages you said were occurring. Upon receiving the notebook, there was very obvious evidence of damage to the LCD assembly, and upon disassembling the LCD assembly the cause of the looseness was not a problem with the hinge but a separation of the metal that connects the hinge to the LCD. This separation of two pieces of metal that are bonded together is usually and most typically consistent with an outside force of some kind. Whether it was dropped or lifted to hard is impossible for me to say, but it is not a design flaw. And if it were design flaw it should have been there all along.

As to your wireless card- I was able to connect to both the internal network here at Dell as well as a network at a local restaurant without issue. I connected to each network multiple times just to be sure.

Finally, I not only ran your system on my desk for several hours without encountering a blue screen error, but found no evidence of a major error in any of your logs. Since you have never been able to provide a specific error code when asked, I don’t know what more can be done to address an issue that we can’t replicate.

And, yes, we have dropped by several times to review this blog against the previous case files and information to ensure we were being as fair and thorough as possible or to determine if we were missing anything.
David Dalka on May 16th, 2008 6:16 pm

Oh the comedy! I don’t have time to defragment all of the things I disagree with in your reply.

But unlike your PR people on many blogs I won’t edit your comment. Almost any Inspiron owner of this vintage would want a new PC (and knows the truth) and I offered to pay the differential towards this. The blog post you refer to was regarding one incident and your blog team didn’t even link to it at the time.

If you spent 1/10 the time actually fixing the problems and satisfying customers instead of making up stories and excuses, I’d totally respect Dell once again.
Dell Deleting Message Board Entries About Dell Inspirons on May 27th, 2008 5:26 pm

[...] my recent Dell communications, I performed a Google blog search on - Dell Inspiron 1505 [...]
cheryl on June 21st, 2008 2:20 pm

I also have a Dell Inspiron 1501 and purchased an extended warranty. Well, it is now 1 1/2 years old and I have had several phone conversations for various problems, and to date none have been resolved. I have had them send their repair person to my home and he used refurbished parts to fix my problem - blue screen, freezing, won’t shut down, loss of cursor, won’t power down (had to remove battery to shut down laptop) and these are just the major problems I have had. Anyway, I received a replace “refurbished computer” two days ago, and after spending another couple of hours setting up the machine, lo and behold…..it froze again and had to take out the battery and unplug the AD adaptor to shut it down. Just got off the phone with a Dell rep who took control of my machine and of course, found nothing wrong. As soon as she hung up my computer froze again. I have the extended warranty, but apparantely it doesn’t allow me to receive a brand new computer…..I am not asking for upgrades…just another new laptop to replace my third non-working one. Is that too much to ask? Dell does not care about their customers which is a shame, and once I can afford it, I will be buying another brand.
Anthony on July 1st, 2008 5:53 pm

I have a Dell 1505 and 1501. I don’t travel with either inspiron, they just sit at desks. Anyway the hinge / case suddenly cracked apart on one side of the 1505. Does anyone have an idea as to the best way to get it repaired? I feel really stupid because I even got one for my parents as I thought I was buying quality… TIA
Poly on August 5th, 2008 6:14 pm

My inspiron 1505 failed one month after the warranty got over (which is 1 year). It didn’t charge the battery. I am assuming its the battery issue. Very poor laptop.
Poly on August 5th, 2008 6:18 pm

The battery costs around $300 in their website. Its just not worth it.
Hannah on August 9th, 2008 2:08 am

I also have the Inspiron 1505. And I could list for days the issues I’ve had. My wireless card not working properly, hinge cracks, the cd rom drive not working, blue screens, the speakers were replaced twice, I’ve gone through two hard drives… all of this, but you would think a 4 year extended warranty would fix this? Nope. I’ve spent a record number of hours talking to representatives, taking me through the same steps over and over again instead of just replacing my laptop. I even sent it to their depot and it was returned to me, still not working. But despite all this I’m still playing their games, continuously begging for new parts and pieces. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone ever! The laptop is a cheap piece and the costumer service is worse than the quality of the laptop!
Hannah on August 9th, 2008 2:09 am

whoa. excuse my spelling error. **customer service.